Google Launches Scholar Beta

Jaidev writes "'Stand on the shoulders of giants' is what Google claims its new service allows you to do. Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

Comments

Is their a reason that this is new?

[daviq]

Because back in January I used it to do research for a paper.

Intriguing.

[millennial]

One problem with standing on the shoulders of giants:
You have to figure out how to climb them first.
Seriously, though, this seems like what the internet was meant to be, back in "the day." IIRC, the 'net started out as an joint initiative involving the government and several academic institutions as a means of creating a repository of knowledge. I'm glad Google is getting into this game, since they seem to have a pretty solid search method figured out. Besides, it could certainly make researching for my thesis a bit easier.

Re:Intriguing.

[hazem]

The other thing about the "standing on the shoulders of giants" is that many believe that Newton was being mean-spirited when he said it, rather than visionary in his views of the source of his brilliance.

"Science: A History 1534-2001" by John Gribbin which suggests that his comment was in fact a barely disguised personal attack. It written in a letter to a scientific competitor, Robert Hooke, who had complained, correctly, that Newton was not giving him proper credit for his discoveries. Newton's response that he had seen further by "standing on the shoulders of Giants" was intended to rule out Hooke, who was famously short and hunchbacked. This is not 100% accepted history but it does seem to fit in with Newton's general demenour and behaviour.

It's a great saying, nonetheless.

Not ready?

[DrEldarion]

This previous article claims that Google Scholar was inferior compared to other services like Highwire. Has it been changed much in the last month, or is it still not as good as it could be?

Yes, I realize that it's still in "beta", but "beta" may as well mean "v1.0" to google.

Re:homework solved!

[hoka]

I don't see why they should. I've had a significant amount of luck using it before for gathering work for research papers and upper division writing classes (Comp Sci ones that is). I've also used it a bit in my offtime to look for some cool things, though I havn't had much luck in that regard.

Old news?

[Quixote]

As others have mentioned, this is old news. This begs the question: is there something special going on between Google and Slashdot? In other words, is there some sort of payola involved?? Just like Roland Pipequaille(?), it is strange how even the smallest Google stories make it into Slashdot.

I think the Slashdot editors/owners should come out and tell us (the paying customers) if this is indeed the case.

Katz

[pamri]

Dupe or not..It seems Jon Katz's article on slashdot itself is cited.

Re:Famous (and not so famous) quotes

[wwwrench]

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."
- Isaac Newton
Somthing interesting about Newton's quote -- it is usually taken as a really modest statement about Newton's contributions and the nature of research. In fact, it was mostly intended as an insult to his rival Robert Hooke, who was practically a midget!

Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how many people in this thread commented on this story without appearing to know that Google Scholar has already been available for ages. Just goes to show that this site main target group is really 13 year old 1337 dudes, as anyone seriously interested in computer science (or, for that matter, any other research subject) uses Google Scholar almost on a daily basis.

And don't even get me started on the editor not knowing about it either...

Re:Full text search save a lot of time!

[insomnio]

I always found scholar to be the worst option I have. All the academic search engines that my university uses provide full text and/or where I can get the paper at my library.

Re:Useless?

[epugachev]

Most likely the your university has a license for the content and the journal websites simply allow you to access the full text as long as you are connecting from an IP within your university's IP block. I doubt Google has made any special arrangements.

However, some journals do seem to handle access control by looking at the referring URL. Those are the journal websites I hate, as I can't bookmark the sites themselves but have to click through from another site (usually in the library catalog) every time.